• May 2
    Workers Unite, Workers Create: Coal Miners, Cultural Workers, and Radical Unions in 1930s Appalachia, South Wales, and the American Southwest

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Camille Guérin-Gonzales Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2010-2011) History and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies, UW–Madison   This seminar focuses on part of a larger project that explores the production of social space in coal mining communities in three regions, the Appalachian South and the American Southwest in the U.S., and South Wales in …

  • Apr 25
    Women’s Hospital Work in Renaissance Italy: Reassessing Knowledge and Practice

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Sharon Strocchia Solmsen Fellow (2010-2011) History, Emory University   This presentation examines women’s nursing activities in the hospitals of sixteenth-century Italy in light of changing disease environments and new charitable initiatives associated with the Catholic Reformation. The appearance of syphilis after 1500 posed a massive public health challenge to Renaissance cities, prompting the …

  • Apr 18
    Mormons or Muslims, They’re Not Us. But Who are We? Religious Difference as a Prism for Cultural Identity in Denmark

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Julie K. Allen Resident Fellow (2010-2011) Scandinavian Studies, UW–Madison   In the aftermath of the Mohammed cartoon crisis of 2005, Danish society was often painted as intolerant and racist. A closer look at the cartoons in question, however, reveals that their depiction of Mohammed is incidental; their real focus is questioning Danish cultural …

  • Apr 11
    Voice and Presence: Performance Aspects of Turkic Oral Epics

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Karl Reichl Honorary Fellow (2010-2011) Turkic Studies, University of Bonn   Based on my field-work in the Turkic-speaking areas of Central Asia, I will explore and illustrate some of the elements that characterize the live performance of an oral epic. The singer is present as narrator, musician, actor, entertainer, tribal historian, and the …

  • Apr 4
    Margins of Belief: Renegades as frontier Protagonists in the Early Modern Mediterranean

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Steven Hutchinson Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2010-2011) Spanish and Portuguese   Corsair activity, i.e., state-sponsored piracy carried out in the name of both Christian and Muslim lands, was largely responsible for the presence of millions of captives/slaves in the early modern Mediterranean. During this period some three hundred thousand men, women, and …

  • Apr 1
    The Global Renaissance: Some New Interdisciplinary Perspectives

    Memorial Union

    2011 Conference:   This conference will explore the “Global Renaissance” from a variety of perspectives and will address the following topics: the exchange of commodities and goods; imperial encounters with distant cultures; European intellectual encounters with non-European cultures; and literary representations of non-European cultures. The conference will highlight the work of three keynote speakers who …

  • Mar 28
    Proust’s Calculus of Personality

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Richard Goodkin Senior Fellow (2009-2014) French and Italian, UW–Madison   Calculus, invented in the seventeenth century by Leibniz and Newton and perfected over the next two hundred years, is not only the foundation of higher mathematics but also an indispensable tool for a broad spectrum of intellectual and practical endeavors that entail quantification …

  • Mar 24
    A Community-Wide Discussion of Ethics and Race

    Mosse Humanities Building, Mills Hall

    2011 Nellie Y. McKay Lecture in the Humanities: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University   Professor Gates’ talk will deepen the community-wide discussion of ethics and race launched this fall through the Go Big Read! program. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the Institute for Research in the Humanities, …

  • Mar 21
    Notes Toward a Theory of Resistance

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Len Kaplan Honorary Fellow (2008-2011) Law, UW–Madison   Weimar’s weak liberal state folded into Fascism. In the US since the 1970’s critics have warned about “fascism with a friendly face” and more recently a US form of fascism (Hedges) or Inverted Fascism (Wolin). What do these dire predictions represent? What lessons from Weimar …

  • Mar 7
    Beasts and Monsters

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar Mario Ortiz-Robles Resident Fellow (2010-2011) English, UW–Madison   This seminar will focus on the animality of the monsters that appear in late-Victorian gothic fiction. It will explore how evolutionary dynamics inform the narrative representation of figures such as Dracula, Jekyll-and-Hyde, and Dorian Gray and consider the extent to which these rhetorical effects help …